Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), from their inception, have existed to preserve for owners of original ideas and unique, creative works (“underlying works”) the ability to restrict, and set the terms for, the use, sale, reproduction and distribution of such underlying works. Legal enforcement of IPRs against those who infringe or misappropriate underlying works, however, is usually regarded as a course of last resort based on the transactional costs and time associated with such enforcement. More typically, the owners of IPRs to underlying works prefer to develop markets for such works which (1) make the creation, reproduction or alteration of the underlying works technically difficult or expensive, (2) facilitate volume distribution of the underlying works, and (3) enable price points for the underlying works that incentivize legitimate uses of the works and dissuade unpermitted uses. Taking historical examples in the world of copyrights, printing presses were relatively expensive for all except volume producers of books and other printed materials. Only those publishers who developed good distribution channels and popular printed works were successful. Wax record etchers were perhaps not so expensive to obtain, but during the prime era of their usage one needed access to the talent who would produce original recorded content for the metallic master from which multiple wax copies were then made, which was difficult to accomplish for all but well known record labels. For those who could afford the means for producing quality books and records, and cultivate a big enough market of consumers to recoup their investments and earn a profit, came the ability to do so by charging attractive prices for these underlying works.
The advent of digital content and the Internet has undermined the traditional assumptions surrounding the creation, use and distribution of underlying works by IPR owners. The tools for creating quality digital content—such as digital cameras, video recorders and audio mixing equipment—have become relatively inexpensive, thus enabling many more people to be creators of quality underlying work. Similarly, the Internet enables an easy and inexpensive way for digital content creators to distribute and offer for sale their underlying works. The tremendous ease by which digital content can be reproduced, altered and then distributed on the Internet creates, on the one hand, an inexpensive network through which underlying works can be offered for sale and use on a mass scale. On the other hand, however, both digital content creation tools and the Internet severely erode IPR owners' ability to restrict and set desirable terms for the reproduction, alteration and distribution of their underlying works. Traditional IPR owners, particularly, who are used to obtaining high financial returns on the sale, use and distribution of their underlying works, have been reluctant to make such works readily available in digital media and on the Internet because they fear an inability to track, and recoup a proper value for, all the uses to which their underlying works may eventually be put.
Mechanisms are needed that facilitate the creation of marketplaces for digital content which better incentivize IPR owners to make their underlying works of digital content available for sale and distribution. Such mechanisms can take multiple forms, including technologies to inhibit or detect unpermitted uses, reproductions and distributions of digital content (“DRM”). There are many DRM solutions in the marketplace. But DRM, by itself, has had only a limited impact on facilitating efficient marketplaces for the sale and distribution of digital content. Another such mechanism is an online repository for centrally collecting and managing the distribution of digital content, as well as the IPRs associated with such content. One such mechanism is disclosed in currently pending U.S. application Ser. No. 11/560,320 filed on Nov. 15, 2006.